Speakers and geographic distribution

There are between 60 and 80 million native Urdu speakers. Overall, besides the more than 160 million who speak Urdu in Pakistan, there is considerable Indian population who communicate in Urdu everyday. Some scholars think that Urdu has had such an impact on the Hindi of India that Hindi in itself has evolved into a new language: Hindustani; a blend of Hindi and Urdu. It is believed that most Indians speak Hindustani.

Official Status

Urdu is the national language of Pakistan. It shares official language status with English. Although English is used in most elite circles, and Punjabi has a plurality of native speakers, Urdu is the lingua franca and is expected to prevail. Urdu is also one of the official languages of India, and in Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and the state of Andhra Pradesh, Urdu has official language status. While the government school system in most other states emphasizes Standard Hindi, at universities in cities such as Lucknow, Aligarh and Hyderabad, Urdu is spoken and learned and is regarded as a language of prestige.

Classification and related languages

Urdu is a member of the Indo-Aryan family of languages (i.e., those languages descending from Sanskrit), which is in turn a branch of the Indo-Iranian branch (which comprises the Indo-Aryan and the Iranian branch), which itself is a branch of the Indo-European linguistic family. If Hindi and Urdu are considered to be same language, then Urdu can be considered to be a part of a dialect continuum which extends across eartern Iran, Afghanistan and modern Pakistan Template:Citation needed—right into north India. These idioms all have similar grammatical structures and share a large portion of their vocabulary. Punjabi, for instance, is very similar to Urdu: Punjabi written in the Shahmukhi script can be understood by speakers of Urdu with a little difficulty, but spoken Punjabi has a very different phonology (pronunciation system) and cannot be easily understood by Urdu speakers.

Dialects

Urdu has four recognized dialects: Dakhini, Pinjari, Rekhta, and Modern Vernacular Urdu (based on the Khariboli dialect of the Delhi region).

Modern Vernacular Urdu is the form of the language that is least widespread and is spoken around Delhi, Lucknow, Karachi and Lahore, it becomes increasingly divergent from the original form of Urdu as it loses some of the complicate Persian and Arabic vocabulary used in everyday terms.

Dakhini (also known as Dakani, Deccani, Desia, Mirgan) is spoken in Maharashtra state in India and around Hyderabad. It has fewer Persian and Arabic words than standard Urdu.

In addition, Rekhta (or Rekhti), the language of Urdu poetry, is sometimes counted as a separate dialect.

Levels of formality in Urdu

The order of words in Urdu is not as rigidly fixed as it is thought to be by traditional grammarians. Although usually (but not invariably) an Urdu sentence begins with a subject and the ends with a verb. That is why Urdu is often called as SOV language (e.g. Subject-Object-Verb language). However, Urdu speakers or writers enjoy considerable freedom in placing words in an utterance to achieve stylistic effects, see Bhatia and Koul (2000, pp. 34-35).

Urdu in its less formalized register has been referred to as a Template:IPA (ریختہ, "rough mixture"). The more formal register of Urdu is sometimes referred to as Template:IPA (زبانِ اردوِ معلہ), the "Language of Camp and Court."

The etymology of the word used in the Urdu language for the most part decides how polite or refined your speech is. Urdu speakers would distinguish between [pa:ni:] and [a:b] for example, or between Template:IPA and Template:IPA.

If a word is of Persian or Arabic origin, the level of speech is considered to be more formal and grand. Similarly, if Persian or Arabic grammar constructs, such as the Izafat, are used in Urdu, the level of speech is also considered more formal and grand.

Politeness

A host of words are used to show respect and politeness. This emphasis on politeness, which is reflected in the vocabulary, is known as Takaluf in Urdu. These words are generally used when addressing elders, or people with whom one is not acquainted. For example, the English pronoun 'you' can be translated into three words in Urdu: the singular forms 'tu' (informal, extremely intimate, or derogatory) and 'tum' (informal and showing intimacy called "apna pun" in Urdu) and the plural form 'aap' (formal and respectful). Similarly, verbs, for example, "come," can be translated three ways: "ayye" or "aaen" (nazalized n)( formal and respectful), "ao" (informal and intimate with less degree) and "aa" (extremely informal, intimate and often derogatory).

Vocabulary

Urdu has a vocabulary rich in words with Indian and Middle Eastern origins. The borrowings are dominated by words from Persian and Arabic. There are also a number of borrowings from Sanskrit, Turkish, Portuguese and more recently English. Many of the words of Arabic origin have different nuances of meaning and usage than they do in Arabic. In fact, Urdu is the classical example of the Muslim empire's curiosity.

Writing System

Image:Urdu alphabets.pngTemplate:IPA notice
Urdu is written in a derivative of the Persian alphabet, which is itself derivative of the Arabic alphabet. Like Semitic Languages, Urdu script is written from right to left. Urdu is similar in appearance and letters to Arabic, Sindhi, Persian, and Pashto. In their modern incarnation, Urdu differs in appearance from Arabic in that it typically uses the more complex and sinuous Nasta’liq style of script, whereas Arabic is more commonly written in the modernized Naskh style. Nasta’liq is notoriously difficult to typeset, so Urdu newspapers were made from hand-written masters (a.k.a katib or khush-navees) until the late 1980s. The daily Jang was the first Urdu newspaper composed in Nasta’liq on computer. There are efforts underway to develop more sophisticated and user-friendly Urdu support on computers and the Internet. Nowadays, nearly all Urdu newspapers, magazines, journals, and periodicals are composed on computers via various Urdu software programs.

Usually, bare transliterations of Urdu into Roman letters omit many phonemic elements that have no equivalent in English or other languages commonly written in the Latin alphabet. It should be noted that a reasonably comprehensive system has emerged with specific notations to signify non-English sounds, but it can only be properly read by someone already familiar with Urdu, Persian, or Arabic for letters such as:Template:Lang or Template:Lang and Hindi for letters such as Template:Lang. This script may be found on the Internet, and it allows people who understand the language but without knowledge of their written forms to communicate with each other.

A list of the Urdu alphabet and pronunciation is given below. Urdu contains many historical spellings from Arabic and Persian, and therefore has many irregularities. The Arabic letters yaa and haa are split into two in Urdu: one of the yaa variants is used at the ends of words for a long ē sound, and one of the haa variants is used to indicate the aspirated consonants. The retroflex consonants needed to be added as well; this was accomplished by placing a superscript ط (toay) above the corresponding dental consonants. Several letters which represent distinct consonants in Arabic are conflated in Persian, and this has carried over to Urdu.

Urdu is occasionally also written in the Roman script. Roman Urdu has been used since the days of the British Raj, partly as a result of the availability and low cost of Roman movable type for printing presses. The use of Roman Urdu was common in contexts such as product labels. Today it is regaining popularity among users of text-messaging and Internet services and is developing its own style and conventions. Habib R. Sulemani says, "The younger generation of Urdu-speaking people around the world are using [Romanized Urdu] on the Internet and it has become essential for them, because they use the Internet and English is its language. A person from Islamabad chats with another in Delhi on the Internet only in Roman Urdu. They both speak (almost) the same language but with different scripts […]. Moreover, the younger generation of those who are from the English medium schools or settled in the west, can speak Urdu but can’t write it in the traditional Arabic script and thus Roman Urdu is a blessing for such a population."

Literature

Urdu has only become a literary language in recent centuries, as Persian and Arabic were formerly the idioms of choice for "elevated" subjects. However, despite its late development, Urdu literature boasts some world-recognized artists and a considerable corpus.

Prose

Religious

After Arabic and Persian, Urdu holds the largest collection of work on Islamic literature and sharia. These include translations and interpretation of Qur'an, commentary on Hadith, Fiqh, history, spirituality, Sufism and metaphysics. A great number of classical texts from Arabic and Persian, have also been translated into Urdu. Relatively inexpensive publishing, combined with the use of Urdu as a lingua franca among Muslims of South Asia, has meant that Islam-related works in Urdu far outnumber such works in any other South Asian language. One of the most popular Islamic books was originally written in Urdu, the Faizal-e-Amal.

Poetry

Template:MainImage:Ghalib.gif
Urdu has been the premiere language of poetry in South Asia for two centuries, and has developed a rich tradition in a variety of poetic genres. The 'Ghazal' in Urdu represents the most popular form of subjective poetry, while the 'Nazm' exemplifies the objective kind, often reserved for narrative, descriptive, didactic or satirical purposes. Under the broad head of the Nazm we may also include the classical forms of poems known by specific names such as 'Masnavi' (a long narrative poem in rhyming couplets on any theme: romantic, religious, or didactic), 'Marsia' (an elegy traditionally meant to commemorate the martyrdom of Hazrat Imam Hussain, grandson of Prophet Muhammad, and his comrades of the Karbala fame), or 'Qasida' (a panegyric written in praise of a king or a nobleman), for all these poems have a single presiding subject, logically developed and concluded. However, these poetic species have an old world aura about their subject and style, and are different from the modern Nazm, supposed to have come into vogue in the later part of the nineteenth century.

Ghazal (غزل), as practiced by many poets in the Arab tradition. Mir, Ghalib, Dagh and Faiz are well-known composers of ghazal.

Foreign forms such as the sonnet, azad nazm (a.k.a Free verse) and haiku have also been used by some modern Urdu poets.

Probably the most widely recited, and memorized genre of contemporary Urdu poetry is naat—panegyric poetry written in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. Naat can be of any formal category, but is most commonly in the ghazal form. The language used in Urdu naat ranges from the intensely colloquial to a highly Persianized formal language. The great early twentieth century scholar Imam Ahmad Raza Khan, who wrote many of the most well known naats in Urdu, epitomized this range in a ghazal of nine stanzas (bayt) in which every stanza contains half a line each of Arabic, Persian, formal Urdu, and colloquial Hindi. The same poet composed a salaam—a poem of greeting to the Prophet Muhammad, derived from the unorthodox practice of qiyam, or standing, during the mawlid, or celebration of the birth of the Prophet—Mustafa Jan-e Rahmat, which, due to being recited on Fridays in some Urdu speaking mosques throughout the world, is probably the more frequently recited Urdu poems of the modern era.

Urdu poetry terminology

Ash'ar (اشعار) (Couplet). It consists of two lines, Misra) (مصرعہ); first line is called Misra-e-aala (مصرعہ اعلی) and the second is called 'Misra-e-sani' (مصرعہ ثانی). Each verse embodies a single thought or subject (sing) She'r (شعر).

History

Urdu developed as local Indo-Aryan dialects came under the influence of the Muslim courts that ruled South Asia from the early thirteenth century. The official language of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and their successor states, as well as the cultured language of poetry and literature, was Persian, while the language of religion was Arabic. Most of the Sultans and nobility in the Sultanate period were Persianized Turks from Central Asia who spoke Turkish as their mother tongue. The Mughals were also Turks from Cental Asia and spoke Persian as a second language. The mingling of these languages led to a vernacular that is the ancestor of today's Urdu. Dialects of this vernacular are spoken today in cities and villages throughout Pakistan and northern India. Cities with a particularly strong tradition of Urdu include Hyderabad, Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, and Lucknow.

The birthplace of the Urdu language is not known with certainty. Urdu literature has a long arabic history, however, and because of this it has strong middle eastern roots. The word Urdu itself comes from the Turkish word ordu, "tent" or "army", from which we get the word "horde". Hence Urdu is sometimes called "Lashkari zaban" or the language of the army. Furthermore, armies of India often contained soldiers with various native tounges. Hence, Urdu was the chosen language to address the soldiers as it abridged several languages.

Wherever Muslim soldiers and officials settled, they carried Urdu with them. Urdu (along with Persian) enjoyed commanding status in the literary courts of Muslim rulers and nawabs, and flourished under their patronage, partially displacing Sanskrit as the language of religious intellectuals in Indian society. The prestige bestowed upon Urdu at the expense of Sanskrit was a source of irritation for many religious Hindus, and to this day there remains religiously motivated conflict between the languages that sometimes makes dialogue difficult.

Urdu continued as one of many languages in Northwest India. In 1947, Urdu was established as the national language of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in the hope that this move would unite and homogenize the various ethnic groups of the new nation. Urdu suddenly went from a language of a minority to the language of the majority. Today, Urdu is taught throughout Pakistani schools and spoken in government positions, and it is also common in much of Northern India. Urdu's sister language, Hindi, is the official language of India.

Urdu and Hindi

Technically, linguists do not distinguish between Hindi and Urdu as separate langauges. For them, Urdu is just a variant of Hindi, written in Perseo-Arabic script and with a heavy Persian and Arabic vocabulary (cf. Webster's New World Dictionary). Both these languages are based on the Khariboli dialect—the dialect of the Delhi region. However, Standard Urdu and Standard Hindi are definitely distinct languages—for the purpose of politics and sociolinguistics. There are two fundamental distinctions between them:

The source of borrowed vocabulary (Persian or Sanskrit), and the script used to write them (an adaptation of the Persian script written in Nasta'liq style, or the Devanagari alphabet). In colloquial situations in much of the Indian subcontinent, where neither learned vocabulary nor writing is used, the distinction between the Urdu and Hindi tends to zero. In other dialect areas, the distinction may become even more pronounced even in colloquial speech, for "Hindi" in such cases will often refer to the local dialect.

The most important distinction at this level is in the script: if written in the Pereo-Arabic script, the language is generally considered to be Urdu, and if written in devanagari it is generally considered to be Hindi. Since the Independence of Pakistan, the formal registers used in education and the media in India have become increasingly divergent from Urdu in their vocabulary. Where there is no colloquial word for a concept, Standard Urdu uses Perso-Arabic vocabulary, while Standard Hindi uses Sanskrit vocabulary. This results in the official languages being heavily Sanskritized or Persianized, and unintelligible to speakers educated in the other standard.

Note that for the purpose of linguistics, neither of above two arguments qualify for the purspose of considering Hindi and Urdu to be separate langauges. For example, English has about 80-90% of its technical and formal vocabulary coming from Latin (mostly through French). But this fact does not make English a Romance langauge (ie., languages descending from Latin)—English is always considered to be a Germanic language, because its "common and everyday vocabulary" and grammar is based upon Old German. Script never causes distinction between languages, because linguiostics deals with language as it is "spoken"; writing is just an artificial thing.

It can be argued that Standard Hindi is a form of colloquial Hinduistani, intentionally de-Persianized and de-Arabicized, with its formal vocabulary borrowed instead from Sanskrit. Similarly, it can also be argued that Standard Urdu is also a form of Hindustani, intentionally de-Sanskritized, with its formal vocabulary borrowed instead from Persian and Arabic.

These two standardized registers of Hindustani have become so entrenched as separate languages that often nationalists, both Muslim and Hindu, claim that Hindi and Urdu have always been separate languages. However, there are unifying forces. For example, it is said that Indian Bollywood films are made in "Hindi", but the language used in most of them is almost the same as that of Urdu speakers in Pakistan. The dialogue is frequently developed in English and later translated to an intentionally neutral Hindustani which can be easily understood by speakers of most North Indian languages in India and with slight difficulty, for Urdu speakers in Pakistan too.

Urdenglish

There is a tendency to use English words and expressions in Urdu speech in Pakistan. This mixture is popularly known as Urdenglish. Accordig to Khalid Ahmed of Daily Times[8] :

Those who speak Urdu sabotage it with colorless English words. The so-called ‘English-medium’ community does it all the time. So do most politicians. Asked to speak only in Urdu most of us go into contortions of unease. But the unkindest cut of all is that our great creative writers in Urdu too can’t speak Urdu for a minute without plastering us with ordinary not-too-original English expressions.